This spooks me a bit. I'm a big fan of Chargify, but for their prices to jump like this and totally remove the free plan is scary. That will make it much less attractive to brand new web apps that don't have a proven business model.
With the new pricing scheme your setup cost for accepting credit cards are merchant account, gateway (ie. Authorize.net), and $99/mo for Chargify. For most brand new web apps that's going to be significantly more than you pay for server/hosting costs. That's a bitter pill to swallow when you're not even sure if anyone will actually pay for your service.
this is disappointing. we were looking forward to starting to use chargify because of the free tier. Now I would be reluctant to even sign up until I was sure I had at least a few paying customers. I don't remember exactly but the free tier seemed pretty generous, maybe cutting that down to under 5-10 customers is free? To at least get people hooked on it without such a big barrier to entry.
Even giving me 5 customers free would encourage me to try them, but they can forget that now -- because I'm not going to commit to anything close to $99 a month unless I actually have hundreds of paying customers. Just my personal point of view, but it feels like they have so much business now that they no longer care about getting any new customers.
I agree, I'm working on a SaaS that is hopefully going to be deployed in a month where I was planning to use Chargify, but the $99/month seems hard to justify when I can just use paypal.
With the new pricing scheme your setup cost for accepting credit cards are merchant account, gateway (ie. Authorize.net), and $99/mo for Chargify. For most brand new web apps that's going to be significantly more than you pay for server/hosting costs. That's a bitter pill to swallow when you're not even sure if anyone will actually pay for your service.